Binance to Undergo System Upgrade Tomorrow, Deposits, Withdrawals, Trading to Be Halted

Major crypto exchange Binance plans to undertake a scheduled system upgrade tomorrow that will prevent deposits, withdrawals, and trading for roughly six to eight hours, according to an official announcement published on May 14.

Yesterday, the exchange’s CEO, Changpeng Zhao (CZ), had announced that the platform was planning to fully resume deposits and withdrawals today, which had been suspended in the wake of a major hack of the platform on May 7. The breach resulted in the theft of around 7,070 bitcoin (BTC) from the exchange’s hot wallets — worth over $40 million at the time.

According to today’s post, the system upgrade will start tomorrow May 15 at 03:00 AM (UTC), during which time deposits, withdrawals and trading services will not be operating.

In a tweet accompanying the post, CZ noted that “During trading halt, we will update no less than every 2 hours, as per usual.” The post also states that:

“Once the upgrade is complete, we will make a further announcement and provide users with a 30 minute window to cancel orders, process deposits, withdrawals, and use all other account related functions before trading resumes.”

As previously reported, CZ and the Binance team have largely kept details of their post-hack actions light, warning that hackers are potentially closely following their public communications and that excessive disclosure could compromise the exchange’s security response strategy.

While the public has broadly continued to react positively to Binance and CZ’s response to the major incident, the post-hack days were briefly clouded by a controversy over CZ’s public revelation that he had considered — and rejected — the idea of responding to the theft with an attempted and contentious Bitcoin “blockchain re-org approach.”

To press time, Binance is ranked the second largest exchange globally, seeing a close to 60% uptick in daily trade volumes over the past 24 hours.

Bitcoin (BTC) is trading at around 14% down on the day, soaring past the $8,000 mark at $8,081 to press time, according to CoinMarketCap.